


13 6 11 8 15

by CeruleanMusings



Series: With Friends Like These [2]
Category: Holes (2003), Holes - Louis Sachar
Genre: Camp Green Lake, Gen, Pre-Camp Green Lake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26518321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeruleanMusings/pseuds/CeruleanMusings
Summary: She always liked his hands. They fascinated her, how they could switch between being gentle as a flower petal and hard like steel at a moments notice. How he could use the same fist to kiss an eye and caress her cheek. How they could build up and destroy, keep her tethered and push her away. They were powerful. Complicated. Imperfect. Companion fic to Inconsolable.
Relationships: Squid (Holes) & Original Female Character(s)
Series: With Friends Like These [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928209
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	13 6 11 8 15

She always liked his hands.

Sure, some would notice his eyes; the impossible color of bitter chocolate meeting a sweet, honeyed whiskey. Or his smile, all crinkled eyes and rounded cheeks starting in one corner, living in the shadow of a smirk. Or his aura, as some would say; a perfect dance of detachment and longing, drawing eyes of disdain and intrigue in one fell swoop.

But she always noticed his hands.

Noticed the little mole on his right thumb, just below the crease of the knuckle; the short, uneven ridges dotting the tips of his nails; the slight curve of his long, thin fingers, poised and ready to curl inwards; the scars collected over the years telling the tales of fence jumps, broken bottles, cigarette handling, and bicycle tumbles.

They fascinated her, how they could switch between being gentle as a flower petal and hard like steel at a moments notice. How he could use the same fist to kiss an eye and caress her cheek. How they could build up and destroy, keep her tethered and push her away. How they aided him in balancing a thin line, one pulling him by both wrists, ready for him to topple over, to give in, to lose.

They were powerful. Complicated. Imperfect.

And yet she always noticed his hands.

**_Thirteen_ **

The tremble in her hands stilled when he wrapped his around hers. The backs nestled in his palms, small and delicate in his large grasp. His fingers rested atop of her bent knuckles and the pointer on his right guided hers up to the slick curve of the trigger. Her heart thudded in her chest and she swallowed thickly.

"Whenever you're ready, you just curl here and squeeze," Alan said. "But only when you're ready. Otherwise, don't put your finger on the trigger. Okay?"

"Uhhh." No, _not_ okay! Mickey was standing in the middle of the woods, facing a row of bottles, with a gun in her hands. She was most certainly _not_ okay! You'll be fine, he said when he revealed what the big 'surprise' was that he was practically vibrating when he showed up at her house that Saturday morning. It'll be fun, he said as he pedaled her on his bike; chin brushing the top of her head as he stood to see over her where she sat perched on the handlebars. You'll thank me for this, he said as he pulled a wooden box from a hollow in a tree trunk, revealing a black bb gun inside.

She'd backed away at the sight, round eyes wide. She'd been around a gun before, her father made sure she knew where he kept his hidden in the house. Always separated from the bullets, of course. She wasn't to touch it, but he wanted her to know where it was. Just in case, he always said. And she couldn't imagine a scenario where she, of all people, would need to wield a gun. Until Alan 'surprised' her with one. She made a note to herself to remind him what a surprise actually was.

And still he managed to draw her in, to explain how to load and unload it, how to hold it, how to line up her shot, how to use the sight, and now how to shoot it. Like she was _actually_ going to shoot the thing…And then he put it in her hands. Oh crap, she was _actually_ going to shoot the thing.

Her stomach pitched and rolled as sour saliva coated her tongue. "Alan…I don't think I can do this."

"Relax, Disney"—she didn't have to see his face to know that a smile of amusement curled his lips—"You'll be fine. Just take a breath and relax."

Alan's hands shifted from her hands and settled over her ears. His thumbs nestled around the curve of the backs of her ears and his palms, softer than she remembered, pressed gently against her ears, sealing off all sound except for the stuttering beat of her heart. Swallowing thickly, she did as she was told and took a breath, held it let, it out, and took another breath. Her heart slowed and she took a step back. He was still there, solid and steady. She took another deep breath, lifted the gun, lined up her shot, closed one eye. She breathed out. Her finger curled on the trigger and she squeezed.

_Crack!_

The gun recoiled and she screamed, the sound almost covering up the shattering bottle across the wooded area. Letting out a whoop of a laugh, Alan's hands dropped to her shoulders, giving them a squeeze. "See? I _told_ you you could do it! Your first shot too!"

Mickey stared over at the log the bottles were lined up, now down by one. The remains littered across the dirt floor. Sunlight bounced off the remains, throwing glitter in her eyes. Exhilaration burst within her like colliding stars.

She grinned. "Can I do it again?"

"Go for it." Alan's hands covered her ears again, but she heard his following statement, felt it vibrating in her bones, "I got you."

He did. She knew she was safe in his hands.

**_Six_ **

The sticky remains of the fat tears left tracks on her cheeks. She sniffed and brushed away the droplets clinging to her chin. The pavement beneath her burned hot through her clothes and she forced herself up to her feet. The brief contact of the ground on her hands and her scraped up knees made a fresh wave of pain flare and pulse. She grimaced and sniffed again, a shaky breath slipping out between her widely spaced teeth. It hurt but not as much as her bruised pride. And the shame of humiliation burned more than the sun-soaked concrete ever could.

With slow, foot-dragging steps Mickey continued up the sidewalk and to her house. Her lower lip trembled as it hit her: how was she going to explain this to her momma? She just got her new bike for her birthday and now it was just…gone. Because some bully came and knocked her over and took it. And she just lay there on the ground rather than try and get it back.

It was expensive! They didn't have to tell her that; she heard her momma and daddy talking about getting the bike for weeks. Saving money here, cutting costs there, and then she went and got it taken. She was a bad daughter! They were going to throw her out onto the street! They weren't going to love her anymore!

A fresh wave of tears hit her, and she burst into another round of sobs, hastily rubbing at her eyes with her fisted hands. Her stomach twisted and the skin around her eyes burned and she wanted to hide under her covers and live in her bed forever.

"Hey Mickey!" Alan jumped up from the cracked, uneven steps from her home. His trusty soccer ball was tucked beneath his arm. He always wanted to play lately. He was good at it; she tended to chase after him and the ball to keep up rather than actually play the game. "Your momma said we can play. Wanna go to the park?"

He swam and swirled in her blurry vision and she hastily shook her head. "No, I can't," she wailed, "I've been bad!"

"What happened?"

"Some…someone. Someone came and…and knocked me down! And took…and took my biiike!" Tears continued in the marked path over her rounded cheeks and down her chin. They dotted her t-shirt before the Texas heat dried them up only moments later. "And now—and now, momma and daddy aren't gonna love me anymore!"

Alan threw down the soccer ball; it rolled a few feet away. Stepped forward he gently wiped the tears away from her face. "Who did it?" he asked and she blinked up at him, eyebrows crinkling beneath the sudden steel to his once liquid honey gaze. She shook her head, quietly conveying three words: I don't know. "I'll find him," he said, "and I'll hurt him and I'll get your bike back."

"He'll hurt you. He's so big!"

"I'll hurt _him_ ," he insisted. "He made you cry. I'll find him and make him cry." Mickey stared up at him. Alan was eight and a half, as he'd taken a liking to reminding her lately. He was the bravest kid she knew. If anyone could get it back, it would be him. And that thought alone made the pain in her stomach ease a little. Just a little.

"Don't…don't hurt him too much," Mickey mumbled. She didn't want to get in more trouble.

Alan didn't respond; he grabbed her hand and directed her back to the street. Her hand curled, grabbing and holding on tight, lest she fall into a hole that she wished would swallow her up and take her away.

"Are we running away?"

"No, we're getting a Bomb Pop." Mickey let out a cry of delight, a little skip stuttering her fast-paced step. "We had enough money left over after going to the lawn dro mat."

He guided her down the street. She held on tight.

**_Eleven_ **

"Alan!" Mickey whirled around in her swivel chair, mouth twisting downwards on one side as her eyebrows puckered.

He looked over at her from where he sat on her bed, propped up against the pillows. Lowering his headphones to his lap he asked, "What?", clearly unaware or unbothered with the distress in Mickey's voice.

Heaving a breath, she held up the white stuffed bear sitting on her desk, with a bright sparkly red bowtie and small black top hat. Or, what used to be white. Its pristine fur was now marred with black and gray streaks. "Sir Bearington looks as if he'd been working in a coal mine!"

Alan blinked. "So wash him." He gave her a look that screamed " _duh!"_ and put his headphones—well, _hers_ , because his mother couldn't afford a new Walkman—back over his ears. She slumped against his pillows, knees propping up the sketchpad he'd been hidden behind for the past few hours as she did her homework. He really should be working on his too but, as he said, there wasn't a point when he knew he wasn't going to get a good grade anyway.

"I can't just _wash_ him," she protested, rubbing her thumb against a few of the finger-shaped marks on his fur. She ignored the roll of his eyes from behind the sketchpad. "He can't just be thrown in the machine like that. He'll fall apart." Frowning, she straightened his lopsided bowtie until it sat right-side up. "He's delicate."

"So's your brain."

" _Alan!_ "

"Alan," he mimicked her, wrinkling his nose and sticking out his tongue. She returned the gesture. God, she hated it when he did that, made her sound whiny and annoying. Sometimes she thought he didn't like her anymore, with all his mean comments and mimicking. Her mom said it was because he was going through a maladjustment period, whatever that meant. She also said something about money changing people. That couldn't be true, she was still the same.

"Can you just…not touch anything?"

"I'm touching your bed," he immediately replied.

"Anything _else!_ " She grabbed a discarded pillow off the floor and threw it at him. He leaned out of the way and she watched in horror as it smacked against her lava lamp. They both watched with wide eyes as it wobbled and then toppled over, smacking against the hardwood floor.

The top of the lamp flew one way and the glass middle rolled in another direction as the base lay flat near the bottom of the dresser. Mickey held her breath, waiting for the distinct sound of her mother's heels on the stairs, the tightness in her voice as she shouted at them for making a mess or scuffing the floor.

Seconds ticked by; Mickey counted them off on her nearby alarm clock. The house remained silent, save for Mrs. Martinez vacuuming somewhere down the hall. (She was their new housekeeper. She was nice, had sparkly brown eyes, always smelled like fresh bread and told Mickey cool stories about her family and childhood. She also called Mickey _Chiquita_ , which she liked.)

"That was your fault," Alan stated, breaking the silence.

Grumbling beneath her breath, Mickey uncurled from her desk chair and picked up the lamp. She carefully put the parts back together and set it up on her bedside table, straightening the silver-framed photo of her grandfather standing in a field somewhere holding a large basket filled with peaches.

"Come on, let's go play outside." Maybe if she got him out of the house she wouldn't have to worry about anything else being broken or marked.

"Can't." He smirked at her. "I'm doing homework."

She crossed her arms. "No, you're not. You don't do homework."

"Yeah I am. Art class." He tapped his pencil against the sketchpad.

"You hate art class." He lifted and lowered one shoulder in a shrug. She poked him in the shoulder, digging her finger in the way she knew he hated. "Let me see."

It was his turn to heave a big sigh. "Fine," he grumbled, setting his pencil down on the bedside table. He hesitated a moment, looking down at the sketchpad, and then handed it over.

She expected to see something grotesque, like the monsters he doodled lately, but this…this was amazing. Sir Bearington may as well have popped right out of the page or posed for a picture with how realistic his pencil rendition appeared on the page. Even the fur looked as if it were real; Mickey supposed if she touched it that it would feel as soft as Sir Bearington's fur was in real life. He even got that mischievous sparkle in Sir Bearington's eye.

"Wow," she uttered, "this is so good!"

His nose wrinkled and he rubbed the back of his neck. "It's no big deal," he mumbled, taking the sketchpad back, cheeks flushed. She didn't bother to tell him that he now left pencil smudges against his skin. She was too impressed that his hands, poised and ready to fight, made something so beautiful.

**_Eight_ **

The stars twinkled above, stretching on in a vast space so endless Mickey couldn't comprehend that they couldn't be touched. Even as she reached upwards, her fingers seemed to graze the underbelly of the darkened sky. And yet there she was, down on Earth while her grandfather got to gallivant in stardust.

"How far away do you think it is?" she asked.

"What?" Out the corner of her eye she saw Alan's head turn towards her. They lay back on the slightly damp grass, shoulder to shoulder. Alan had changed his clothes at some point. Mickey still wore her black dress.

"The sky. Space." She gestured upwards; one particularly bright start twinkled by her finger.

"Dunno." Alan shrugged. "Far."

"Hmm." Mickey's mouth twisted to the side. Lowering her arm, she placed her hands on her stomach. It hurt a lot less than it had a few hours ago. Her eyes still stung when she blinked. "I wonder where they go."

"Waddya mean?"

"Momma said Poppy's in heaven. She said he's somewhere up there. But where? On the moon? On a cloud? On a rocket? Racing on a comet?"

"You saw him. He was dropped in the dirt."

Mickey rolled her heavy eyes. "No, I know _that_. But…where'd the rest of him go? What happens after?"

"Maybe…he's just dreaming." It was Mickey's turn to look at him. He held her sorrowful blue gaze. "You go to sleep and dream, right? My momma said this is the big sleep." He flexed his fingers in air quotes. "Maybe that's what heaven is. Dreams."

Mickey nodded. That sounded right; he was ten, double digits, that meant he knew things she and the other single digit kids didn't. "Do you think Poppy's happy up there?"

"Sure," Alan said simply. "Has to be better than this right?"

 _Maybe._ She looked back up at the sky. A star screamed across, leaving a bright trail in its wake. Mickey swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. Tears collected on her lower lids. How could anything be better with him gone?

Alan took her hand; her fingers slipped in between his like puzzle pieces slotting into place.

**_Fifteen_ **

"You're gonna break your thumb if you hold it in like that." Squid uncurled her fingers and moved her thumb away from her palm. "See, if you punch like that all the force will go to your thumb. And you're gonna need that thumb to dig."

Mickey rolled her eyes. She didn't need the reminder. It wasn't as if she could ignore the fact that most of her day was spent out on the dry lakebed "building character" as the counselors claimed. The dirt clinging to her sweaty skin and to her jumpsuit and settling beneath her nails made it impossible to forget where she was, why she was there, and what they had to do day in and day out.

"If it's between my thumb and getting these guys to leave me alone, I'll lose my thumb," she said.

Squid snorted. "You say that now but I'm telling you, it hurts like a—"

"Don't finish that sentence!" Mickey said, her eyes settling into a glare. He grinned around the toothpick in his mouth. Mickey's mind flashed back to that same smile greeting her as a kid, right after she reached her breaking point when he intentionally annoyed her. She shook her head. "Just…keep going. Where do I punch? The nose?"

"Sure, if you want them to turn into a raging bull," Squid replied. "Which, by the way, is how Bull got his name." Mickey's body deflated and her mouth gaped. She had a curiosity when it came to learning others' nickname origins but this one…this one she could have done without. How could he throw that out so carelessly? Like an afterthought? This was her life they were talking about! One bad hit and…she didn't even want to think of what he could do to her if he was provoked. _I have to do this,_ she told herself, setting her jaw. _I have to get him to leave me alone._ "Whatchu wanna do is get him down and keep him there. Go for the solar plexus. If that fails, go for the liver."

She shook her head, refocusing. "The…the what?"

"It's that spot right beneath your ribs. Punch there and angle up, he'll go down like a sack of bricks."

She lifted an arched eyebrow. " _You_ know what a solar plexus is?"

"Shaddup." He reached out and flicked her on the nose. It was her turn to grin at him. " _Anyway_ , the power comes from your legs so you'll wanna make sure your hips are squared. If all else fails, just go crazy." He snorted. "No one wants to deal with crazy."

"And this will work?"

He nodded. "You're small and fast, use that to your advantage. Here." He lifted his hands, palms facing towards her. "Give a few hits."

Her eyes bounced between his hands and his face, checking to see if he was serious; his steady gaze assured her that he was. Pressing her lips together, she stood with a wider stance like he had said. The large legs of her orange jumpsuit made it a little difficult as she swam in the oversized fabric and the two-sizes-too-big boots weighed her feet down, but she got into position. She curled her hands into fists, making sure not to tuck in her thumbs like she was told. She eased a breath out between her teeth, sucked in the dry, dusty air, and surged her fist forward.

It smacked against his palm and he blinked. "That's it?"

She stared at him, incredulous. "I threw a punch!"

"You have more power than that. You swing a baseball bat better. Do it again."

"I'm not swinging a bat at someone!"

"Just do it again, Mouse." She stuck her tongue out at him and he returned the gesture. But still, she got back into position and threw another punch, striking his palm harder. "There ya go. Again."

And so, behind the Wreck Room after a long day of digging, Mickey found the extra energy to land punch after punch on Squid's palms, imagining Bull's and Eagle's faces when she landed a good hit on them. Wishing Brett Walker's face and neck and chest and lower regions were beneath her fists, so she could do damage to all the places he'd done damage to her.

By the time he stopped her, her fingers stung with the repeated strikes against his skin, rivaling the fire burning in her stomach. Was this what control felt like? The rush of power and satisfaction?

Squid let out a low whistle, shaking out his hands. "A few hits like that and B-Tent won't mess with you ever again."

"Good, that's the point." Mickey started bouncing from foot to foot, shifting her weight, throwing punches to imaginary opponents.

"Easy Terminator, don't go around pickin' fights your ass can't handle."

Mickey snorted. "Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?" Squid stared blankly at her. "You're being a hypocrite," she translated. "You've been in a lot of fights."

"I don't pick the fights, I finish them," he corrected. "And that was only when people were being stupid. Which you are." Pressing a finger to her forehead, he tipped her head backwards. Frowning, she smacked his hands away from him and took pause, catching the scarred and torn skin around his knuckles.

She grasped his hand, bringing it close to her face and he stilled beneath her touch. Humming, she ran her thumbs over his knuckles, tracing the puckered and jagged lines that rose and fell over the back of his hand. Years of fight and fire were etched into his skin, a blueprint for premature enlistment into survival. And here she was, studying every bit of information she could get; for her own foray into toeing over the line that was drawn for her at birth.

Her ocean blue eyes met his honeyed whisky gaze and she held onto his hand.

Maybe, after all this, they didn't need to fight back against the world, and they could finally rest.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to get this done and finished and posted for my birthday yesterday but a day late isn't bad. I love digging into Squid's and Mickey's relationship before CGL. I might end up making a one-shot collection just for different scenes of them over the years pre-CGL so I at least have a place to put them all. Please read and review!


End file.
